The Indigenous Talent Portal is designed to provide a space where Indigenous talent can browse and apply to Public Service employment opportunities aimed at the recruitment of Indigenous talent. They can also browse jobs open to the general public on the site.
Functionality is planned to allow for the posting of internal mobility opportunities for Indigenous public servants, promoting access to continuous learning, development and promotional opportunities.
Members of the Indigenous community can create a profile to showcase their unique set of skills acquired through ancestral knowledge, and through mainstream pathways. At the request of Indigenous users, there is functionality planned to allow Indigenous talent to show or hide Indigenous components of their profile, as they choose, when applying to various types of employment opportunities.
Building inclusively with Indigenous talent means learning to understand and respect connections between land, identity, family and community.
Think that has nothing to do with staffing? Think again. Asking an Indigenous applicant to fill out a text box for their current location of work is a loaded question, especially if the staffing system doesn't recognize Indigenous traditional territories in its naming conventions, or the idea that applicants may live seasonally in different places.
Why Build This?
The Government of Canada is not an easy place to work for many Indigenous people. Systemic racism and discrimination are still an ongoing reality, despite a growing effort across the Public Service to address issues, change behaviours, and remove barriers. But systemic racism several hundred years in the making doesn’t disappear overnight, nor does the legacy of its presence in the memories and experiences of Indigenous people.
The Indigenous Talent Portal is being developed for the Indigenous community - with decisions and directions set by the Indigenous community - “to reclaim our stories and to reset the way Indigenous talent is valued.”
In a time of reconciliation, there was no way Talent Cloud could consider building a new model for talent recruitment that didn’t put the needs of Indigenous talent at the heart of the design, (as well as the needs of other underrepresented and equity-seeking groups). For Indigenous talent, the trust between government and community is broken. To rebuild trust, we begin by rebuilding a new process, together. That means making choices, like hiring our Indigenous Community Liaison before our first developers created the first line of code for the platform. Inclusion cannot be an afterthought. It is, by its very definition, at the heart of the model.
“As we focus on combatting racism, it is not sufficient to simply equip ourselves with knowledge and tools. We must take action in ways we know will be meaningful in addressing all barriers and disadvantages. Being a leader means taking an active role in ending all forms of discrimination and oppression, consciously and constantly challenging our own biases, and creating an environment in which our employees feel empowered and safe to speak up when they witness barriers to equity and inclusion. Inaction is not an option.”
~ Clerk of the Privy Council; Call to action on anti-racism, equity, and inclusion in the Federal Public Service
Steps in Development
In-House Expertise: One of the first hires on the team was our Indigenous Community Liaison, who has led the design and community outreach for the Indigenous Talent Portal. Having someone Indigenous on the team, with lived experience in Indigenous communities and extensive knowledge of protocol, has been essential to the team’s efforts to engage Indigenous users respectfully and meaningfully at all stages of design and development.
Space to Talk and Share: In an environment where many of our user testers were residential school survivors or the children of residential school survivors, talking to people about working for government and trusting government with personal information wasn’t like the discussions we had with other user groups. There is a difficult history and a context here that has to be honoured, and to honour it, you first have to acknowledge it. In this case, that meant changing our approach to user testing. The team worked with our Indigenous Community Liaison to find spaces where smudging could be conducted at workshop sessions, and seats could be arranged in a circle. Our Indigenous Community Liaison also took care to acknowledge traditional territories, and to speak in her community’s language whenever possible. We kept Kleenex boxes on tables. Our Indigenous Community Liaison cooked and shared traditional foods. The team brought cookies and chocolate.
Internal Engagement: The team reached out throughout the process to Indigenous public servants with various degrees of seniority to understand early and long term issues related to recruitment, onboarding, work environment, and career advancement. The team brought several issues back for multiple rounds of discussion, clarifying our understanding of the issues, desires, and concerns of Indigenous employees before we moved on to user testing.
External Engagement: Similar to our process for engaging internal employees, representatives from the main national organizations were engaged in discussions, and later the reviewing of designs, as well as individual members of various Indigenous communities who would be the type of talent the Government of Canada would be lucky to attract.
Prototype Testing: At each stage of design, users were engaged - carefully going over every text box, process step, image, and function on the portal. Many of these prototype designs involved very difficult issues, such as self-identification. Several of these components are still being finalized with all groups involved, and some features may need to be tested live, and then revised. Some features also represent a significant departure in thinking from the way data like this is normally collected and represented on Government of Canada sites, which is why our team has endeavoured to always keep Indigenous communities at the steering wheel when it comes to design. There isn’t always agreement between communities, either. And working through these design issues with communities until it’s right is part of our Digital Standards commitment to empowering users in the design process.
Giving Back: During user testing sessions, the issue of the value of Indigenous languages, and the challenge of bilingualism, came up over and over again (effectively, having to learn two colonial languages in order to advance in a public service career, while Indigenous languages aren’t recognized). It was a contentious and painful discussion. So early on, our team decided that at least some of our Indigenous Community Liaison’s time every week would be devoted to working on this issue, even though it wasn’t a part of our mandate and our platform features plan. So why do it? Because when a team in the Government of Canada asks Indigenous communities to give time and stories and ideas and emotional investment to something, that team should give back. In our case, that meant dedicating some of our team resources to support work done by the Indigenous Federal Employees Network on advancing a proposal of ideas on this issue. This isn’t a Talent Cloud initiative. It’s just a chance to show our acknowledgement of the struggles and barriers faced by Indigenous talent inside the Government of Canada, even today, and to do what we can to help with this.
Reducing Barriers for Equity-Seeking Groups: When is an “add on” program a solution? And when it is a problem?
An add-on program is an initiative that seeks to close a gap in performance outcomes by providing an additional service, above and beyond the main program’s operations, such as a targeted recruitment program for Indigenous employees or a mentoring program for women executives. These types of initiatives can be extremely valuable in advancing inclusion and diversity… but they can also be problematic. So how can a team looking to address gaps in outcomes know whether the initiative is likely to help or hurt?
An add-on program that fills a unmet need, while generating structural changes to the central program, contributes to the advancement of inclusion. An add-on program that is created so the central program doesn’t have to be changed contributes to systemic discrimination. If there is an inequality in the power dynamics, structural design, and choice architecture at the foundation of the central program, no amount of additional programming offered elsewhere will produce a long-term corrective step towards equality. The end goal of an add-on program should be deep systemic change. As long as this is the compass bearing that informs decisions, it’s at least starting out pointing in the right direction.
Status of the Portal
The restrictions related to privacy and Talent Cloud’s cloud server environment have meant that we haven’t yet been given permission to launch the Indigenous Talent Portal. This was because use of the Indigenous Talent Portal by applicants was deemed to be an expression of their employment equity status, which is information that can’t be collected on a server that doesn’t allow for Protected B data collection. (See Protected B and the Move to Cloud in Section 1.)
The design and user testing of the Indigenous Talent Portal is in advanced stages, and ongoing efforts have been made to make sure that members of the Indigenous community were able to direct the work and the features at all stages of design. But due to the restrictions on release, Talent Cloud hasn’t launched final steps in the development phase. While much of the design is set up to integrate with and leverage existing features on the Talent Cloud platform, and the system of portals is in place, it would still take a few developers and a few months to get this portal live, plus work from our Indigenous Community Liaison.
Currently, there are no funding partners to support this work going forward, although there have been a few dozen managers who have already come forward asking to post positions on the portal. There seems to be strong demand for teams looking to increase the diversity of their talent. The Indigenous Federal Employees Network has also identified the value in Indigenous employees being able to post profiles and find opportunities for internal mobility, development, and promotion. The team continues to try to seek resources and support for this endeavour.
The job advertisements on the Indigenous Talent Portal contain new elements that were identified as important during engagement sessions with Indigenous users.
Employees can filter opportunities to only see those designed to attract indigenous talent, or remove the filter to see all Talent Cloud opportunities.
Unique imagery and colors contribute to a user experience that communicates an inclusive experience for Indigenous talent.
A descriptive paragraph, drafted by the hiring manager, is provided to explain why this job requires Indigenous talent. (Indigenous employees reflected during user testing sessions that they were sometimes wary of applying to opportunities designed to attract Indigenous talent due to fears of being tokenized. This paragraph is intended to clarify, upfront, the reasoning behind the recruitment need so applicants can decide for themselves if they are comfortable with the role.)
Guidance for Managers seeking Indigenous Talent
Managers drafting job advertisements designed to attract Indigenous Talent will use the same tools and portal as other Talent Cloud job advertisements, but additional fields and guidance are provided.
Managers are asked to reflect on the unique knowledge which Indigenous people bring to the Public Service when crafting their impact statements.
Managers are provided with checkboxes to indicate the reasons they are looking to hire indigenous talent. (This list of reasons to hire Indigenous talent came from workshops with both Indigenous users and hiring managers.)
Hiring Indigenous talent for the sole purposes of increasing representation in an organization is seen as a red flag by some in the Indigenous community. If the only reason provided by the manager is under-representation in their organization, an additional paragraph of guidance is provided to help managers better understand the risks of tokenizing Indigenous talent, and whether or not they will be able to provide a hiring opportunity that will benefit and be inclusive for Indigenous talent.
Honesty Pledge
The honesty pledge allows self-declaration of Indigenous status, while being respectful of individual identity.
The options have been presented as checkboxes so multiple affiliations could be indicated if needed.
A carousel was introduced for the options so that no community would be above another.
Allows space for individuals who may not be able to trace their ties to a specific community by including an option separate from Métis. (This was in response to expressions of frustration from members of the Métis community. They raised the issue of Indigenous people without clear ties to a specific Indigenous community sometimes selecting the category of Métis on government forms because they didn’t self-identify as Inuit or First Nations, and there was no other option.) This feature introduces a number of complexities around identity and belonging, and is still in active testing. There is a strong likelihood that it will need to go through several more rounds of refinement, given the sensitivity of the topic.
All Canadians are permitted to apply to any Government of Canada position. The “ally” option provides an opportunity for honesty for those who are not Indigenous, but perhaps have ties to the Indigenous community or Indigenous cultural competencies. These applicants may still be considered for the position, but priority is intended to be given to indigenous talent. A link is also provided to redirect people who no longer feel they are a good fit for the opportunity. The intention behind this series of choices and nudges is to deter those who might not be Indigenous, but see themselves as connected to Indigenous identity, to have options of representation other than a false claim of Indigenous ancestry. False claims of Indigeneity, and the friction and harm this causes for Indigenous communities, was something that was raised repeatedly in workshops, and Indigenous users asked us to test approaches for addressing it. Ultimately, falsely making such a claim is a form of racism, and it’s a behaviour we wanted to discourage on the platform. We worked with both behavioural sciences and Indigenous experts to come up with this initial intervention. But it is in need of testing, and will require several rounds of refinement.
A signature box is provided to highlight the importance of honesty in Indigenous communities, especially for self-declaration, where even a few bad actors can cause a disproportionate amount of damage.
Profiles Tailored to the Indigenous Community
The profile has been improved to allow Indigenous talent a place to highlight what makes them unique and...
The option to show/hide various components of the profile to hiring managers.
The option to identify the location of the user with Traditional Territory/Nation/Community. These options give Indigenous users narrative agency and the ability to describe themselves and their relationship to community and land in the way that they want, rather than using a choice architecture for geography that reflects colonial naming conventions.
A text box is provided so Indigenous users can, if they want to, describe their lived experience with (or in) Indigenous community(s).
Indigenous users are given a chance to highlight if they are traditional language speakers. The intent is to provide options that are broken down by language families and dialects.
Traditional skills are provided to help ensure that the skills profiles of Indigenous users reflect the unique talents of the Indigenous community - skills that can be otherwise overlooked, especially in government.
